Switch out 18GB drives for 36Gb drives ??

That is correct.

Replace one drive at a time, waiting for the raid controller to rebuild the replacement drive. Once both drives are rebuilt, you can expand the volumes.

 

Good luck.

The question now is, once done how do we increase the size of the drive (E: in his case)? Sorry if this seems a basic question, but I've never needed to do this before myself.

I'm in a similar situation except that I have a PE6400 running Win2000 server and a PERC2 with a RAID 10 array comprising 6 9Gb drives partitioned 4Gb(C:) + 19Gb(D:) + 2Gb(E:) but I want to expand the size of the D: drive. I only use the E: drive as a dedicated swap partition so I can move the swap file temporarily to the C: drive and delete the E: partition if needed.

Update from Dell

It seems that the Perc 3/Di RAID conroller does "not" support volume expanding. What I had to do in this situation is the following:

1) Ghost the box
2) Replace drives
3) Install barebones OS
4) Restore with ghost with new partition size.

 

after some additional thought ... can I get you to clarify what you mean when you say the volume cannot be expanded. Do you mean that the E: drive cannot be expanded, or do you mean that the mirrored array cannot be expanded to use all ~36Gb? If so, would it be possible to define a second mirrored array using left over space on the new drives? (I doubt I would do this, but am just wondering if it is possible).

If its just that the E: primary partition cannot be expanded, I can always create an F: or something.

Thanks.

Thank You for the Info. Too bad the volumes can't be extended :-(